Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Jozef Wesolowski is the first high-ranking Vatican official to face criminal charges for sexually abusing children. Steve Inskeep talks to Joshua McElwee of the National Catholic Reporter.

....Vatican City, the home of the Catholic Church, is also a tiny, independent nation with its own laws. And today, one of its citizens is under house arrest. The Vatican took former Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski into custody. He had already been defrocked in June. All of this follows allegations that he sexually abused young boys while he was the Vatican's ambassador to the Dominican Republic. He's going to stand trial on a Vatican criminal court. Joshua McElwee, who is Vatican bureau chief for The National Catholic Reporter, is covering this story.

....Well, the Vatican had acted a couple months ago. What they'd done is they laicized Wesolowski, who was an archbishop, which basically made him a normal Catholic. He's no longer a priest. He's no longer an archbishop. And now they're saying that they're prosecuting him according to the laws of the Vatican City State for, apparently, accusations of abuse in the Dominican Republic.http://www.npr.org/2014/09/24/351074916/vatican-arrests-former-archbishop-on-child-abuse-charges

How is it possible that Erika Murray’s oldest children went to school, had friends, and saw relatives, yet nobody raised the alarm about the horrors filling their Blackstone home?....

It all went to hell the summer before Spadaro turned 11, when she found her mother on the floor, in seizures. Doctors removed a brain tumor, leaving her mother with impaired judgment and impulse control, and dependent on sedatives.Her father, who had broken his hip and quit work years earlier, was also heavily medicated. Depressed, and with strained finances, her parents mixed alcohol with the drugs, descending into addiction.

“That combination of the unwashed people and the unwashed pets and the food that may be halfway round the bend,” recalled Spadaro, now 48. “You learn to function with the smell, but I don’t think you ever stop noticing it.”

She did what many kids do in these situations: She became the parent, at 11. She remembers trying to clear some of the mess away, hauling trash to the garage, and cleaning up after the beagle. For meals, she warmed frozen pizza in a toaster oven. She did laundry so that she and her sister — several years younger — would look presentable.

“I tried to keep things as best I could, but I could not be in charge of two parents, a younger sibling, and the pet,” she said.

For three years, none of the many adults in their lives came to their rescue....

Three years after the spiral began, her mother’s family took the girls in. Spadaro does not know why they decided to intervene then, and not sooner....